She's Let Herself Go

From Kate Kennedy, New York Times bestselling author and host of the Be There in Five podcast, comes a candid and culturally observant exploration of millennial motherhood and womanhood. In She’s Let Herself Go: Notes from a Former Childless Millennial, Kennedy returns to the questions she once asked while on the fence about having kids, revisiting what she feared, assumed, and imagined about motherhood now that she’s living inside it. She also has discovered a whole new set of questions, like what’s so bad about a woman realizing she understands Emily Gilmore more and more with each passing year and why do we now need a rotation of four to six serums after a double cleanse? Borrowing its title from the familiar insult reserved for women who become mothers, get older, or change too visibly, She’s Let Herself Go turns the phrase around to ask the most important question: Go where?

Kennedy follows that question through the physical, emotional, and often absurd realities of becoming someone’s mother, writing about shifting ambitions and priorities, beauty and body standards, caregiving and boredom, pregnancy and loss. Examining what we’ve been told motherhood will be, from ’90s babysitting gigs and frumpy sitcom moms to the tabloid bounce-back machine and Nancy Meyers kitchens, Kennedy explores what it means to be in a culture that expects women to be transformed by motherhood, but then tells them to get back to who they were before.

Part memoir, part cultural commentary, She’s Let Herself Go is neither a highlight reel nor a how-to, but a hilarious and deeply personal look at the messy middle of early motherhood, for anyone who has ever felt nostalgic for her former self, wondered who she’s becoming, or been bewildered by the experience of loving a person who once existed only as a hypothetical.